Sundance, Butch and Me

by Judy Alter

  Pa was gone a long time and returned smelling strongly of whiskey. Behind him rode Brother Davis, who was good enough to come bury Ab even though he never saw the Baird family in his small congregation. Pa didn't believe in making the effort to go to church on Sunday morning. "You can thank the Lord for all his blessings right here," he said, but I knew Mama longed to go to church and visit with the other ladies. And she wanted us to have a Christian upbringing.

  "Mrs. Baird, I'm sorry about your loss," Brother Davis began, "but we know that Abernathy is with the Lord."

  "Right, Brother Davis, right. Now let's just get on with the burying," Pa said impatiently.

  We three stood together in that clearing while Brother Davis asked the Lord to welcome Abernathy Baird, a child to be loved. Pa looked appropriately grief-stricken. Ab was, after all, his son, and I told myself to remember that. If it had been me in that box, Pa would have grieved. I needed to believe that. Pa put the coffin in the ground, Brother Davis said the Lord's Prayer, and Mama threw a handful of earth on the coffin. Then, grasping my hand firmly, she turned back to the cabin. She couldn't, I suppose, bear to watch Pa fill in the grave.

  "Brother Davis, may I offer you some coffee?" she asked, and I marveled at her manners. I knew she wanted to bury herself in the bed and cry until she could cry no more. I also vaguely knew how much she needed the company of other women at that moment. I did the best I could, but I was too young to have a woman's understanding of grief and its inevitability. I still railed against the injustice of my brother's death.

  "Why didn't Mrs. Newsome come with the minister?" I asked. Mrs. Newsome was the one woman both Mama and I knew in town.

  "I don't suppose your father told her about Ab," Mama said wearily.

  Chapter 2

  Mama didn't last out the next summer after Ab died. Like my brother, she died of consumption, but there was more to it than that. She died of a broken heart, grieving for Ab, and she died of being just plain worn out. In my heart, I blamed Pa again, but I said nothing.

  This time I was the one who dressed the deceased, carefully shaking out a dark wool traveling suit I'd found in her trunk. It was faded and streaked by folding and dust, but it was far better than the calico she wore daily. I had looked at her wedding dress—it was of ivory silk, made to wear over the crinoline she no longer had—and deliberately put it to the bottom of the trunk. Somehow it didn't seem fitting to me that she go to her grave in the dress that had united her with my father. The traveling suit was probably her honeymoon outfit, but I put that out of my mind. There were no other choices.

  Pa went to town for a coffin this time. The stack of barn wood did not offer enough for an adult. I have no idea how he paid for it or what kind of credit he had to beg for, but I knew that Mrs. Newsome was generous to a fault. She had given Mama credit from time to time, and I used to fancy that she worried about Mama because she was married to such a lout. Pa came home with a fine, sturdy pine coffin... and two men to help him dig. They dug the grave close to Ab's. This time when Brother Davis came out from town, the Newsomes and his own wife accompanied him. It made more of a farewell for Mama, and I was grateful to them for coming.

  Before the ceremony, Mrs. Newsome pulled me aside. "Martha," she asked, "can I do anything for you?" I swear she looked over her shoulder at Pa as she said it.

  "No, ma'am," I said, "but thank you."

  "If there is ever anything I can do, I want you to come to me," she whispered, adding, "no one else."

  "Yes, ma'am," I said, wondering what she meant and yet recognizing that she knew something, understood something that I didn't. Little did I know how soon I would turn to her.

  Pa, looking hard at me, cleared his throat and said, "Well, let's get on with it."

  Mrs. Newsome turned and went to stand at her husband's side by the newly dug grave.

  Once again Brother Davis asked the Lord to welcome a worthy Baird to heaven and to bless the grieving father and daughter left behind. I stole a glance at Pa to see if he was grieving, but he simply stood, wearing his one boiled shirt and black coat, with his eyes downcast. I suppose in his own way he was grieving, but when the minister afterward grasped his hands and kept trying to offer comfort, Pa thanked him gruffly and pulled away as soon as he could.

  "Don't know why that man came out here," Pa grumbled as I put johnnycake and syrup before him that evening. "Only asked him to speak over Ab because it would comfort your ma some. I don't need him tellin' me the Lord loves me. Hah!" He almost spat in his anger.

  "I didn't bring him," I reminded him, "you did."

  He just gave me a dark look and turned back to his whiskey.

  Pa and I passed by each other without speaking for days, and I was just as happy. I fed him and saw to the house, just as Mama had done, and he spent his days outdoors. But we had nothing to say to each other. I guess, though, that Pa began to think of me as Mama's replacement.

  One night, some six or seven days after she died, I was awakened from a deep sleep by a rough hand over my mouth. Without Ab, I'd taken to sleeping indoors, where the air was close and stale. Even though I was grown—well, almost so—and pretty much fearless, I didn't take to sleeping outside alone. Now, before I could struggle to rise, the arm attached to the hand over my mouth held down my shoulders so firmly that I could not move.

  I squirmed and tried to shout through the hand, but Pa simply held me down and said nothing, while he fiddled with my gown, pulling it up to bunch around my waist. Then his other hand roughly pushed my legs apart, and suddenly I was rent apart with a searing pain. My scream, kept silent by that huge hand over my mouth, echoed in my head but did nothing to blot out the familiar grunting sounds. With each thrust, his rigidness pushed into me, sending rivers of pain throughout my body, while I squirmed and wriggled and did everything I could to get away from him. The unmovable arm held me firm, and the pain, I found, grew worse when I tried to get away.

  Then, with one loud groan, he was through. He rolled off me and stood up, turning his back to me while he buttoned his long johns. All he ever said, and that over his shoulder, was "A man has his needs."

  I was left soiled and sticky on my pallet, shaking from sobs that I did not want him to hear. Within minutes, he was back in the bed across the dogtrot, snoring away. Ever so quietly—who would dare disturb him?—I crept to the washbasin outside and cleaned myself. Dressed in a clean gown—one of Mama's that still smelled of her perfume, though by now I fancied it smelled of him—I lay shaking on my pallet until dawn.

  When I arose to fix his breakfast, I had made one firm decision: He would never again lay a hand on me.

  That morning, he never said a word or indicated that anything between us had changed. "How," I wanted to demand, "can a man do that to his own daughter?"

  But he sat there and held his cup out for more coffee, said he guessed he'd go hunting and might be late getting home that night, and walked out without giving me a second glance. He went not to the woods with his rifle but to the wagon. He hitched the horse and headed for town.

  "To drink away his guilt," I scoffed.

  * * *

  I went back to sleeping outside and vowed I would even when winter came. I sharpened the butcher knife and took it to bed with me every night, hiding it alongside my pallet where I could reach it easily with my right hand, even if my shoulders were held down. And I learned to lie awake until I heard Pa snoring. Only then did I feel safe enough to sleep... and at that, I never slept soundly. I was always alert for another attack.

  I took one other precautionary measure: I kept most of my clean clothes in a pillow sack along with a miniature of Mama and a handwritten note she had once left for me, telling me how much she loved me. It was all ready to snatch up in a moment if I had to flee. And I took Mama's hidden egg money from deep in the trunk where she had buried it and put it in the bottom of the pillow sack.

  I was like a squirrel putting up nuts for the winter, but I knew that my winter would come soon. I was
n't sad about it. No, I was ready to leave that dogtrot, but I somehow needed Pa to do that outrageous thing to justify my leaving. Maybe it was because I was leaving Mama and Ab when I went. Whatever, I knew that I would not live on that poor piece of dirt much longer, and I made my preparations.

  * * *

  Meantime, life went on with a terrible dreariness. If I had missed Ab sorely, there was no way to put into words the emptiness that I felt without Mama. I had soon almost blotted Pa's attack out of my mind—not that it didn't happen or wouldn't happen again, but that I wouldn't think about it. But even were he innocent of that, Pa was poor company for a girl alone. He was sometimes drunk, often angry, never encouraging. I longed for Mama, the loving arm around my shoulders, the words of encouragement.

  When Mama was alive, I used to dream of taking her and Ab with me to San Antonio and starting a new life there. Maybe it was because of tales she told me of the Alamo and the Kentuckians who had behaved there with more courage than Pa would ever have; more probably it was that dimly recalled memory of the traveler who said it was the finest city he'd ever visited. But I had no way to get to San Antonio, no way to support myself when I got there. Right then, it seemed to me that I could flee only if Pa provoked it, if he attacked me again and gave me reason. Later I knew that I should have left before he had another chance. But, for then, I made the same choice Mama had.

  Pa's next attack came a full two weeks after the first one. He had fallen to snoring, and I'd let myself drift off. Like a reenactment of a horrible nightmare, I felt his weight across me, his arm holding both my shoulders down. This time he didn't bother with the hand across my mouth. Who would have heard me scream besides him? And maybe he didn't care.

  "Pa," I said levelly as he hitched up my gown, "don't do this again. I'm warning you...."

  He grunted, and his free hand reached between my thighs.

  My hand reached for and found the knife hidden on the right side of my pallet. I brought it up, plunging it into his side, blindly, without aim. Only later would I suspect that I had hit directly into his heart. At the moment, I was acting out of desperation, unsure that I would even dare to break the skin.

  Instead of those small, satisfied grunts, he let out a howl. The arm on my shoulders relaxed, and he slid sideways enough that I was out from under him. In a flash I was on my feet.

  "You... you've killed me," he gasped, clutching at the wound that was gushing forth an amazing amount of blood.

  I turned my eyes away. "I warned you," I said.

  "A man... has his needs." He struggled to say it and then lost consciousness.

  I didn't wait, never tried to see if I could help him, and later that would haunt me. I simply went into the house to grab my sack of clothes and leftover corn dodgers from supper. Then, still in my nightgown, I fled into the darkness, stepping over Pa's unconscious body as I left.

  In the barn I changed into my best cotton muslin dress, a blue gingham that Mama had trimmed with scraps of white pique that she got I never knew where. Then my nervous fingers struggled to get the harness off its hook and put it on Dan'l, the workhorse that Pa kept but rarely put to work. Dan'l was gentle but old and tired, lazier than Pa, and I wasn't sure he'd take me as far as even Ben Wheeler.

  I stood on a crate and hoisted myself onto the horse's back, just as I'd done the few times Pa made me ride the horse while he guided the plow and the even fewer times I'd ridden Dan'l just to be riding—and away from the farm.

  Now I hitched the dress up to my knees and began to drum my heels on the horse's sides. "Come on, Dan'l, get going," I said in a voice so harsh I didn't recognize it myself.

  It took me several strong words and a lot of drumming of my heels to get that old horse moving, and all the while he stood still my fear rose until it sat like bile in my throat. I fully expected Pa to rise up—from the dead?—and come after me. Was Pa dead? I neither knew nor cared. I simply wanted to be far away from there.

  Finally Dan'l inched down the road with a slow and rough gait. Then, as though he got into the spirit of the thing, he began to pick up speed until he was moving at an awkward trot. I was bounced unmercifully on his back, every bone in my body wanting to call out to him to stop and only my fear silencing my voice. As I rode, I looked over my shoulder from time to time, expecting Pa.

  I have no idea what time we reached Ben Wheeler, except that it was the dark of night. The town was pitch black. Not a light shone, and nobody appeared on the streets, which suited me just fine. I tied Dan'l behind the Newsomes' store and began to wonder how I'd get Mrs. Newsome's attention. She and Mr. Newsome lived in three rooms tacked onto the back of the store.

  "Call me," she had said, adding, "no one else."

  Ever so softly I tapped on a windowpane, whispering so low that even I could barely hear myself saying, "Mrs. Newsome? Mrs. Newsome?" There was no response. Desperation made me bolder, and I knocked more loudly, though I still hesitated to raise my voice for fear of rousing half the town. Still no answer.

  I went around to a window on another side and knocked again, loudly this time. A murmur and a distant noise of stirring told me I had roused someone. I prayed it would be Mrs. Newsome and not her husband, but of course he was the one who came to a nearby door.

  "Who's out there?" he demanded loudly. "What d'ya want, waking a man in the middle of the night?"

  "Please, sir," I said, "could I see Mrs. Newsome?"

  "Who is it?" he demanded, his voice still angry and a little fearful. "Who wants my wife in the middle of the night?"

  "I'm Martha Baird," I said as strongly as I could.

  "The Baird girl?" he asked, his voice rising in surprise but no longer angry.

  "Yessir," I answered, hating every syllable of it, "the Baird girl."

  "Mrs. Newsome," he called, "come here. There's somebody that needs you."

  The Good Lord was awake and concerned, I decided. Otherwise Mr. Newsome would simply have turned me away in the middle of the night. But if He was watching, what did He think about Pa... and what I'd done?

  At Mr. Newsome's bidding, I stepped closer to the door. He disappeared into the house and returned with a lantern. By the time his wife appeared, I was framed in the circle of light made ghostly by his unsteady hand.

  "Lord in Heaven," she cried, "it's Martha Baird."

  "Yes, ma'am," I said. "I... I have to leave... I..." And then the truth of it hit me, and I could not say another word.

  Mrs. Newsome was more than equal to the task. "Come in, child, and tell me what's happened."

  Once inside, seated at a scarred but comfortable kitchen table, I could do no more than shake. Mrs. Newsome stood before me, while her husband leaned against a door frame and yawned openly. I wished he'd go back to bed so that I could talk to her privately. What I had to say, I thought, should be between women.

  She gave me a shrewd look. "He's bothered you, hasn't he?"

  I nodded, realizing she knew before I did what would happen and what kind of a man Pa was. It would take me years and a lot of bitter experience to learn that what gave her that insight was generally called women's intuition.

  "Some men have no good in them...." Her voice trailed off, as though her anger was too much for words. After a minute she asked, "And you've run away?"

  I nodded again.

  "I won't let him come after you," she said in a reassuring tone.

  Only then did I raise my head and take a long look at her. She wore a flannel nightgown with a matching bed cap, both faded from many washings, and her face was lined with fine wrinkles, the sort that come from kindness rather than meanness. Now her eyes were soft and caring, but her mouth was drawn into a hard, determined line.

  In response to her promise of safety, I could only sob loudly.

  Mrs. Newsome may have been nobody's fool. "There's more you need to tell me, isn't there?"

  I took a deep breath. "I think I killed him."

  "Lord God-a-mighty!" Mr. Newsome exploded. "How could a child kil
l her own father?"

  I turned now to look at him. Unlike Pa, he did not sleep in his long johns but wore a nightshirt, a big long affair that hung awkwardly just below his knees. His feet and skinny ankles were covered by black socks, which looked ridiculous against the light pattern of his flour-sack nightshirt.

  "Hush, James," Mrs. Newsome said. "We've got to hear what this child has to say." Then she turned to me and in a carefully controlled voice asked, "Why do you think you killed him?"

  A giggle rose unbidden in my throat, and I wanted to say, "Because he told me I had." Instead I said as calmly as I could, "I stabbed him when he laid on top of me. I... I didn't mean to kill him, but I... I swore he'd never hurt me again."

  She didn't flinch. "He'd done it before?"

  "Yes, ma'am, once, just after Mama died."

  Mrs. Newsome put her arms about me, murmuring, "Poor child, poor child. It'll all be all right." She made me think of Mama, and I bit my lip to keep from dissolving into sobs.

  "How's it gonna be all right?" Mr. Newsome demanded. "She's a murderer. We're harboring a criminal."

  "Hush, James. We've got to think this through. I have no idea if Sheriff Wilks would believe her story or not...."

  "Do you believe it?" he demanded.

  She fixed him with a straight gaze, while I sat holding my breath. "I do. I've known about Ephraim Baird from the first day I set eyes on him... and the bruises his wife used to try to hide only confirmed what I knew."

  "He said," I ventured timidly, "that a man has his needs." I truly thought for a moment that she would pick up the lantern and throw it, so great was her anger.

  Finally she demanded, "James, what more do you need to know?"